SEX ADDICTION

“The Roman Empire was destroyed in part by a dysfunctional ruling class, and in part by invading barbarians who did not share those particular [sexual] addictions. One reason why Christians and Jews of those times turned against Greco-Roman culture is that they did not want to destroy themselves.” James Lewis

“Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat who rationalized criminal abuse if it gave him pleasure.” Ibid

“The American Founders knew all about French decadence, since Jefferson and Franklin served as U.S. ambassadors to Paris. French sexual addiction was France.” Ibid

Harvey Weinstein is a Boomer Leftist, which means that he came of age around the Sixties, the time of love and peace propaganda. Love was good, hate was evil, and peace would come when we all imitated the Bonobo chimps of the jungle and spent our free time… entertaining each other. Love was the answer.

We have the word of Harvard psychology professor Steve Pinker that some of the love and peace crowd of the Sixties mainly went along with the crowd for girls and sex (or perhaps boys and sex.)

So we can imagine Harvey and brother Bob going to the anti-Vietnam demonstrations to shout slogans and score as many chicks as they could imagine. All you had to do is say the magic words, and the gates of heaven would open to you.

Trouble is, they forgot to read the psychiatric literature on sexual addiction, which went back before Freud’s time to a book by Kraft-Ebing called Psychopathia Sexualis. (Sexual psychopathology, or sexual mental illness.) Sigmund Freud saw a lot of sexual mental illness among his patients in Vienna, and wrote case histories about some of them.

But sex addiction has a long, long history, whenever some political power group can exploit some lesser tribe or class of society. All the girls, boys, and sheep you can ever imagine.

The trouble is that the same cute girl over and over again gets boring, so you need an even cuter girl, or one who knows how to pull your strings better, or the daughter of the powerful warlord next door or…. it’s addictive escalation, and we even know the brain basis of it today. It’s called the “dopamine reward pathway” and it seems to be involved in all kinds of addictive behavior: cocaine, opium and heroin, meth, on and on and on. Sexual orgasm can kick off the dopamine pathway, and you need bigger and bigger stimulation for that same old kick. So you have to escalate, even if you have to ruin your life. (See: Tony Weiner, Bill Clinton, and many others.)

If you get into the Hollywood scene, there are plenty of pretty sex objects willing to put out for an acting gig. But then you need more, and younger, and less legal, and more boundary-breaking, and more mixed with your coke habit, and pretty soon you start doing bad things, but you don’t care, really. The stories coming out about Harvey Weinstein (and others) show his increasingly self-destructive behavior, more and more trouble, more fights with his family and powerful corporation, more out-of-control hostility, more violations of law and ordinary decency.

There’s nothing new to historians and psychiatrists. Human beings are boringly predictable, and the Roman Emperors Nero and Caligula followed the same path, along with the Athenian narcissist Alcibiades, who is actually a character from real life, depicted in Plato’s little play The Drinking Party (The Symposium).

Among the Athenians attending the party are Alcibiades the sex addict.

Hippocrates, the Father of Western Medicine, is also one of the speakers at the drinking party, and his speech is about “Nothing in excess.” You can bet he was looking at Alcibiades at that moment.

One reason why Afghanistan is ungovernable today is the competition for cute boys from low-status tribes, who can be recruited by rich males with a taste for variety. Male sexuality tends to be more roving anyway, and there’s nothing to stop believing Muslims from engaging in dominant gay sex. (Submissive gay sex is strictly forbidden in Islam, and can get you pushed off a tall building in Iran or Saudi Arabia.)

So Harvey W. is an addict. The definition of “addiction” is “a behavior that becomes destructive of oneself and others.” When your cravings for crack cocaine get so bad that you have to murder your dealer, or yourself, that is by definition an addiction. Addictions are not limited to illegal substances. Escalating sex is also addictive, and for some people, political power might be addictive.

So Harvey is an addict just as much as that skinny kid shooting up in a back alley downtown. Recently he made a public promise to go to a treatment center, but he still can’t help himself. He keeps doing destructive things. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/harvey-weinstein-hobbes-nasty-brutish/

He is not the only one. Both history and psychiatry tells us about epidemic addictions that destroy whole cultures. The Roman Empire was destroyed in part by a dysfunctional ruling class, and in part by invading barbarians who did not share those particular addictions. One reason why Christians and Jews of those times turned against Greco-Roman culture is that they did not want to destroy themselves.

The Greeks and Romans went down, the French aristocracy went down, and the Weimar Republic gave way to Hitler. The American Founders knew all about French decadence, since Jefferson and Franklin served as U.S. ambassadors to Paris. French sexual addiction was France. Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat who rationalized criminal abuse if it gave him pleasure.

The U.S. Founders emphasized personal discipline over and over again. George Washington kept a diary of all the ways he fell short of his own ideals. Scoring chicks wasn’t one of his ideals. If it was, the British might have won.

So when somebody talks about Love and Peace forever, tell them to read a little history.